Antti Leppänen, Kati Ruohomäki, Lorena Carbajal, Toby Duncan
Nephelococcygia
18.4. – 6.5.2012
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
Nephelococcygia is a word from the comic extravaganza The Birds by Aristophanes. It roughly translates as ‘Cloud-cuckoo-land’ and dates back to 414BC. Originally the name of a utopian city in the sky, built to intercept all communications between the people and their Gods, the word is now used to describe the act of finding shapes in a swirling mass of clouds. It speaks of a compulsive search for understanding and meaning as well as the importance and folly of dreams. The joint acts of making and looking at art both share characteristics with this word and its history.
Lorena Carbajal
(b. 1975)
Exploring language as an ever changing and fluctuating entity, her work investigates the gap between languages and the phenomena of translation and misunderstanding. Her works examine the gap that is created where the superposition of languages, memories and sense of place overlap, and the uncertain, the illogical and awkward is revealed, in an attempt to make sense of the nonsensical.
Toby Duncan
(b. 1978)
In psychology, a “prototaxic mode of experience” is a type of primitive experience characterized by fragmented sensations and images that only last for a short time and that are not logically connected. By asking the viewer to examine, even remember, these fragments, Duncan’s recent work draws parallels with our constant, resolute search for meaning in the face of entropy.
Kati Ruohomäki
(b. 1978)
A mirage can turn a forest into thin pillars and the moon and the sun can become weird squares or be cut in the middle. When you’re in a desert, you see the refractive light reflected from the sky as water.
Ruohomäki’s works are based on the attempt to avoid associations, to not immediately name the things she sees and does. However, in her mind every color, line and shape always refers to something that has a name.
Antti Leppänen
(b. 1978)
Leppänen engages in sculptural works concerned with meanings connoted by cultural, tactile and subjective dimensions of materials. The new works are informed by an interest in immediate physical qualities of the chosen materials and how they relate to certain elementary concepts of sculpture, such as mass, volume and weight.
